It can be stressful to live your life as usual but keep your home looking its best. There are a few simple changes you can employ in your messiest spaces to improve your home’s overall tidiness. These are the main places to consider:

The Junk Drawer

Ah, the infamous junk drawer. Its very existence is proof that if there is a void, it will be filled. Isaac Newton said that. (Not really.) But seriously, the sentiment behind the junk drawer is just that: Sometimes you need batteries or paperclips or earbuds to have a place of their own, but they’re so random. They don’t seem to belong anywhere.

The junk drawer only becomes a problem when you start cramming things in there without stopping to consider whether those things will be valuable in the future. Bread ties? Bottle caps? Receipts? Maybe those things are better off with the actual junk — in the trash can.

Go through your junk drawer and figure out which items can be disposed of. Once you have your miscellaneous items selected, you can organize what you’re keeping in a series of fun ways:

Bundle your earbuds or loose cables with ribbon.

Use a silverware divider to organize your things.

Purchase a series of small boxes or containers and label them.

The Laundry Room

The laundry room is a kind of strange purgatory in your home where socks go to get lost and lint goes to live. It’s a room where things happen, but not one where people go to hang out, so it often gets neglected.

It might be best to include your laundry room in your cleaning regimen. Add wiping down your washer and dryer to your list of things to do. Don’t forget to sweep and mop in there.

If you’re doing what you can to clean the flat surfaces in your laundry room, then it stands to reason that clutter — from objects like clothes or sports gear — will not collect in that space.

The Craft Closet

If your life were a soap opera, the craft closet would be the junk drawer’s (more) evil twin. You need a space for all your paints, yarn and tools — as well as a space for all the items that you hope to eventually use for those DIY projects.

To get the craft closet under control, this is our first piece of advice: Don’t buy or acquire anything that you don’t have time to craft in the very near future. We’re talking about a week, at most.

If you start to collect garage sale chairs or mirrors or window shutters with the intention of fixing and refinishing them but you don’t have the time to do it, then your craft closet will eventually become a craft room. It will eventually become a craft graveyard. Just wait until you have time to craft before adding anything to the collection.

You can easily organize your crafting tools into a manageable configuration using simple containers. Clear bins can simultaneously help you Tetris your tools into your closet while keeping them in sight, so that you know where everything is.

You can also purchase some decorative boxes that reflect your own creativity and then label them for their contents. You could even break out your hand-lettering skills for the task. You could also repurpose a shoe carousel or shoe rack to hold your paintbrushes, yarn, etc.

Tidying up your home is just one of the many ways you can make it more appealing to prospective home-buyers. For more information on how you can improve your home, you can ask us.